An Enya musical score drifts down from the white rafters of the
Victorian boat dock then floats around the meticulously manicured
curves and intense colors of the surrounding tropical landscaping
(see figure 1). In the company of strangers, my family and I wait
in a small line to board the Chief Yahalocee, one out of a small
fleet of Silver Springs’s famous glass-bottom boats. I cannot
help feeling a bit skeptical. How can an old-fashioned tourist
gimmick, such as the glass-bottom boat, compete with the cyberspace
spectacles and multi-media extravaganzas so readily available
today? My barely nine-year-old daughter is already a seasoned
veteran of Space Shuttle launches, the Museum of Science, IMAX
surround-sound movies, Disney and Busch Gardens virtual reality
rides, all supplemented with a daily diet of DVDs and video games.
What fascination can plying across the river, peering down at
aquatic life through a transparent pane of glass encased in the
bottom of a small boat hold for sensation saturated and technologically
savvy tourists of the twenty-first century?

Figure 1

At the turn of the twentieth century, however,
much of the appeal of Silver Springs (Florida’s oldest tourist,
theme park) and the glass-bottom boat tour was not unlike the
interest that Space Shuttle launches and IMAX movies possess for
many tourists today. During the nascent days of Florida’s
budding tourism industry, in the late 1870s, Phillip Morell invented
the glass-bottom.1.(Later, Hullam Jones’ 1878 version
was made from a three-foot hollowed out cypress log.2.) The relative transparency
of the Silver River’s waters coupled with the glass bottom
of the boat promised Silver Springs tourists beauty, motion, and
spectacle while also offering them a scientific education, a sense
of national pride, and a sense of cultural progress (see figure
2). As cultural historian Susan Davis contends, “Every culture
uses nature metaphorically and the natural world provides not
only all means of material life but a common, human currency for
representing ideas about that life as society and culture”
(30).

Figure 2

Illustrating Davis’ point, the privileging
of vision (an outgrowth of the scientific revolution) 3.,
a privileging which informs the design and promotion of the glass-bottom
boat, intertwines with American social constructions of nature
over the last 125 years. Upon the Silver River’s waters
and within the glass-bottom boat, the social significance of America
and its landscape is negotiated within tensions between romantic,
scientific, and cinematic visions. An amalgam of Western myth
and Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Romantic ideals is used to
frame Silver Springs as an edifying landscape of personal, spiritual
and scientific national importance. Like the
destinations of the American Grand Tour, rhetoric surrounding
Silver Springs is indicative of the larger role tourism and spectacle
play in the quest for a national cultural identity bubbling forth
out of an America in the wake of modern industrialization.4.
As cultural critics such as John Sears, David E. Nye, and Mark
Neumann suggest, in many ways the act of tourism and the national
park itself, in the United States of the nineteenth and twentieth
century, functioned as a public space that attempted to help define
and unify American culture and its heterogeneous population. 5.

A Romantic
Vision:
The Quest for the Sublime and Picturesque

As the craggy, yet cheerful, voice of our gray-haired captain
welcomes all aboard, each of us dutifully awaits our turn to climb
up and then down into the belly of the boat. Sinking into the
water, now fully loaded with shorts-wearing tourists, armed with
shiny cameras of all varieties as well as with the occasional
juice-stained sippy cup, the boat slowly slides backward from
the dock (see figures 3, 4). “Bubbles!” squeals a
toddler. To everyone’s delight, thousands of tiny bubbles,
like those in a freshly poured ginger ale, start zipping across
the glass. In these shallow waters, the captain briefly lectures
over a small buzzing speaker, trying to compete with the scratchy
grind of tall river grasses rubbing against the boat’s transparent
bottom. As we reach a clearing, the captain instructs all passengers
to look down at the dizzying depths of the first Silver Springs
cavern on our tour. “What is under water you will be able
to see clearly,” repeats the captain. At this point in the
tour, he proclaims that the glass-bottom makes visible the overwhelming
beauty and scientific knowledge encased within the Silver River’s
crystalline waters. As he promotes the park, I muse to myself
that it has changed very little in the 125 years since Silver
Springs first captured the imaginations of nineteenth century
travelers.

Figure 3 Figure
4

By the mid-nineteenth century, Romantic and Transcendentalist
views of nature as a sublime and picturesque landscape had become
an essential part of experiencing nature for many leisure and
middle-class Americans. Patricia Jansen argues in reference to
tourism in Niagara Falls, for example, “The importance of
the sublime as an element in both elite and popular culture was
well established by the late eighteenth century . . .The craze
for sublime experience entailed a new appreciation of natural
phenomena” (8). John F. Kasson as well contends that aesthetics
of the sublime and picturesque commonly superimposed on to the
American landscape at the turn of the century exemplify the hegemonic
genteel values promoted by elite “official” culture.
Leisure class values such as the quest for the sublime, according
to Kasson, filtered down to the masses (who would later visit
Florida and Silver Springs) via mass-produced periodicals and
the agents of culture such as museum curators and educators. “Genteel
reformers founded museums, art galleries, libraries, symphonies,
and other institutions which set the terms of formal cultural
life and established the cultural tone that dominated public discussion,”
writes Kasson, “as nineteenth-century cultural entrepreneurs
sought to develop a vast new market, they popularized genteel
values and conceptions of art” (4-5).

The genteel values and aesthetic conventions
constructing a Romantic sense of the sublime and picturesque greatly
contribute to American notions of national identity and leisure.
6. During the nineteenth and
early twentieth century, these values and conventions were central
to the history of Silver Springs as an image of America as paradise.
The American leisure class traveler’s quest for the sublime
and beautiful in Florida is revealed in images of Silver Springs
even before the glass-bottom boat was invented. In
1860, Hubbard Hart expanded his successful stagecoach line that
ran between Palatka, Silver Springs, Ocala, and Tampa to include
a steamboat that toured the Ocklawaha and Silver rivers. Hart’s
steamer passengers embarked on a two-day journey that followed
the coffee-colored waters7.
of the alligator lined Ocklawaha River (Upper St. John’s)
up into the crystal clear water of Silver Springs.

The first written accounts of the Silver Springs
steamboat tours illustrate the significance of genteel aesthetics,
Romantic conventions, and American nationalism in the early reception
and twentieth century development of Silver Springs as a tourist
attraction and registered Natural Landmark.8.
And as Nye argues, “The American sublime transformed the
individual’s experience of immensity and awe into a belief
in national greatness” (43). The nineteenth-century travelers,
who had the time and could afford to travel to Florida in significant
numbers, often used the Western literary and fine art canon to
frame their experience and the Silver Springs steamboat tour as
a sublime spiritual journey. Florida history and architecture
historian Margot Ammidown, for example, contends that “many
of the written descriptions of the early trips to the springs
seemed to equate the journey with a spiritual transition to the
afterlife, or to refer to the time-honored notion of the river
as a metaphor for a spiritual journey to the source, which, with
the advent of tourism, became a regular mini-pageant acted out
on the Ocklawaha” (245). For instance, Ammidown cites the
letters of nineteenth-century anthropologist Daniel Brinton (who
is also quoted in the contemporary Silver Springs book) who described
his journey as “one of the most dramatic transitions from
darkness into light that a traveler can make anywhere on the continent”
(qtd. in Ammidown 245).

Such nineteenth-century visitors as Daniel Brinton, Constance
Fenimore Cooper Woolson and George McCall described Silver Springs
using Western myth, Romantic ideals, and European and American
landscape oil painting conventions. Brinton, Woolson and McCall’s
imagery evokes the iconography of the sublime described by American
transcendentalists like Emerson, painted by Hudson River School
artists, and later examined in the twentieth century by philosophers
such as Heidegger. In the 1856 history Notes on the Floridian
Peninsula, Brinton exclaimed, “Slowly drifting in a
canoe over the precipice I could not restrain an involuntary start
of terror, so difficult was it, from the transparency of the supporting
medium for the mind to appreciate its existence” (186).
Woolson commented in 1876 that “the water was so clear that
one could hardly tell where it ended and the air began . . . the
fish swimming about were as distinct as though we had them in
our hands; in short . . . it was enchantment” (30). And
George McCall, while serving in Florida during the Second Seminole
War, wrote, “We were stationary … in a moment all
was still as death. The line of demarcation between the waters
and the atmosphere was invisible. Heavens! What an impression
filled my mind at that moment! Were not the canoe and its contents
obviously suspended in mid-air like Mahomet’s coffin?”
(150).

The intensely disorienting and enlightening collapse of space
and time, described by Brinton, Woolson and McCall, is an essential
component of the Romantic and Transcendentalist vision of the
sublime, vast, natural landscape. The blurred boundary as the
celestial and terrestrial dissolve in the transparency of Silver
Springs’ waters resonates with Emerson’s transcendentalist
vision of the transparent eyeball. Like Emerson’s communion
with the natural world recounted in Nature, the water
and surrounding landscape of Silver Springs act as a catalyst
to the sublime experience believed to initiate a similar reintegration
with the divine. Woolson and McCall become “a transparent
eye-ball,” “nothing,” “all,” “part
or particle of God” (17). The disconcerting elements (a
degree of danger and powerless to the experience itself) implied
in Brinton, Woolson and McCall’s choice to compare experiences
on the Silver River to “terror,” “enchantment,”
“death,” and suspension “in mid-air” illustrates
what Heidegger regarded as the “sublime moment, in which
anxiety is preparation of insight into the whole” (Wilson
155). The anxiety and sense of the ineffable present in Brinton,
Woolson and McCall’s portrayal of Silver Springs also recalls
Kant’s 1870 (about the same time the glass bottom boat appears)
distinctions between the aesthetics of the sublime and picturesque.
The Kantian sensation of the sublime is characterized by a mix
of pleasure and pain experienced in a moment when the mind is
overwhelmed, pained at its inability to grasp fully ideas intuiting,
not imagining, the infinite, the total (Wilson 20). The disorienting
amorphous space described by Brinton, Woolson and McCall also
exemplifies the asymmetry, the formlessness versus the harmony
of form of the picturesque as defined by Kant.

Today, the sublime and picturesque qualities of Silver Springs
are interrupted by the activity of tourists and toddlers and the
motion of the boat. Now, we float above the Spring of Fire, and
our Silver Springs glass-bottom boat turns dramatically leftward
as the captain explains that the spring’s name comes from
the tiny volcano-like forms spewing out of the cavern. Like liquid
in a slow turning glass, I feel as if I am moving in the opposite
direction of the boat, only to meet back with myself at circle’s
completion. “Whoa,” whisper several fellow riders.
Disoriented and a little woozy, the majority of the tourists nonetheless
remain hunched-over, looking through the rectangular frames of
glass in the boat’s bottom at the luminescent fish and rock
formations below. The boat glides to its next stop entitled the
Blue Grotto. Frances Kenneley’s Discover Silver
Springs: Souvenir Book reports that the Blue Grotto’s
“moniker came from the cerulean hue reflected from sunlight
filtering through the water” (14). I’m not entirely
convinced. In addition to the spring’s blue waters, the
well-known, exotic Blue Grotto of Italy or even the infamous Love
Grotto of Tristam and Isolde, made popular by Romantic writers,
must have influenced its naming.

The captain announces the next stop as The
Bridal Chamber. Written over sixty years before my Discover
Silver Springs: Souvenir Book (first copyrighted in 1994),
a 1930s Silver Springs brochure exemplifies how the promotion
of Florida and Silver Springs as a rejuvenating, romantic paradise
(in the genteel Romantic tradition) changed very little even as
the demographic of Florida tourism drastically shifted.9. As the nineteenth century gave way to
the twentieth, so did the steamer to rail and car. By the mid-1920s,
the Florida vacation was no longer restricted to the elite. The
leisure class Victorian travelers, with which early Florida robber
barons like Flagler sought to fill their luxury hotels, eventually
were outnumbered by a new wave of middle class tourists owning
automobiles. The affordable mass-produced cars and subsequent
American highway systems, financed by the Coolidge Prosperity,
made the state available to middle class tourists and homesteaders
(Allen 227). Tin Can Tourists packed up in the new family car
and left for vacation. They flocked southward to visit the state’s
attractions and even scrambled to purchase small pieces of Florida
paradise. Record numbers of tourists even landed permanently in
South Florida to live in communities, steeped in Mediterranean
fantasy architecture: towns such as Coral Gables, Hollywood-by-the-Sea,
and Venice-of-the-South. Evidence to Florida's popular appeal,
Miami alone experienced an influx of 2.5 million people in 1925
(Gannon 77).

Although more middle-brow educational exhibits and working-class
snake milking and alligator wrestling side shows were added to
Silver Springs when Ross Allen opened his Reptile Institute in
1931, the genteel promotion of the park as a sublime and picturesque
paradise changed very little. Writers of the 1930s brochure
compared the park to the idyllic Elysian Fields, and like the
much earlier descriptions of Florida by fifteenth-century French
explorer Ribaut, much of the pamphlet is devoted to framing Florida
and Silver Springs as a picturesque earthly Paradise. Descriptions
of the multitudinous plants and animals in Florida focus the reader
on the fecundity of the earthly garden. The brochure boasts of
rare aquatic life visible through Silver Springs’ crystal
clear waters. In fact, the brochure told readers they would see
“more than 43 varieties of fish, turtles and fresh water
shellfish.” Also attesting to the Eden-like fertility imagery
used to promote the park, the pamphlet notes that plants even
“bloom and bear fruit under water.” Not only are the
plants and animals abundant in Florida’s bountiful landscape,
they are “bewitchingly beautiful, rare and exotic.”

While the long lists of plants and animals at Silver Springs evoke
the natural abundance most often associated with earthly paradise,
the descriptions of the individual’s experience within the
park’s surrounding natural beauty best illustrate the construction
of the park as earthly paradise in the romantic image. Stressing
feeling and the exotic, the text places the reader in an utopian
fantasy landscape by making promises to “all who enter.”
Silver Springs, according to the depression era brochure text
from Richter Library, intrigues and fascinates:

Here is a scene that intrigues the imagination – more fascinating
than anything you have seen, more beautiful than dreams can imagine,
for Silver Springs is in truth the Elysian Fields of America.
They who enter here leave all cares behind them. Individual worries
become petite and insignificant when one is communing with Nature
at her loveliest.

This text reflects the Romantic and transcendentalist desire to
escape from civilization into the rejuvenating arms of sublime
nature. Simultaneously evoking the dwarfing landscapes often associated
with the sublime and restorative powers of nature, the text boasts,
“Worries become petite and insignificant when one is communing
with Nature.” Also, the description of the caves and springs
suggests the overwhelming and sometimes limitless rocky landscapes,
rushing waterfalls, and flowing rivers frequently seen in Romantic
landscape paintings and poetry. The text further emphasizes emerging,
flowing water and a large cavern: “Silver Springs is really
a subterranean river springing from the earth through a vast cavern
65 feet long and 12 feet high.” Including the aesthetic
quality also integral to the Romantic view of nature, tourists
do not only get the opportunity to commune with Nature at Silver
Springs; they commune with “Nature at her loveliest.”

The direct comparison to Elysian Fields also works in conjunction
with the images of the sublime and beautiful nature connoted in
the text. The mythical reference not only evokes the image of
paradise so often associated with Florida, it also suggests the
exoticism, myth, and idyllic past used so often by Romantic poets
and painters. As Wordsworth wrote in “The Prospectus to
the Recluse,”

Paradise, and groves
Elysian, Fortunate Fields – like those of old
Sought in the Atlantic man – Why should they be
A history only of departed things,
Or a mere fiction of what never was? (399)

Silver Springs as Elysian Fields metaphor goes from Romantic nostalgic
reference to idyllic mythological landscape to edifying sublime
nature, elevating the springs to authentic space contrasted against
the artificial man-made trappings of civilized society. The metaphor
illustrates the efforts to exult American landscapes in order
to characterize American culture as equal to, if not superior
to, European culture. The beauty of North America presented as
“evidence” to a unique presence of the divine in the
United States also supported the popular notion of Manifest Destiny.
Charles Sanford noted that American artists Thomas Cole and William
Cullen Bryant, for example, “had need of the sublime to
celebrate what they felt was peculiar and unique about American
scenery” (qtd. in Nye 24). Neumann, Nye, and Sears contend
that American romantic landscape tourism ironically functioned
as a source of cultural production. Within the context of the
America First tourism campaign, Silver Springs as the true Elysian
Fields connotes that the American landscape even exceeds in importance
and authenticity the one imagined by the culture of the Golden
Age of Greece so revered by American gentility and the European
elite. As Neumann argues, the effort to frame places such as Silver
Springs as the true site of ancient myth and literary reference
“fits well with the federal mandate to promote American
scenery as superior to that of Europe; it’s part of a quest
for antiquities.” The presence of Romanticism and the quest
for American antiquities remain at Silver Springs today in the
“Indian legends” and ancient fossils featured so prominently
at the park.

The Chief Yahalocee moves forward. Several adults join the small
children who much earlier abandoned the official position of scientists
leaning over microscopes, examining the invisible world revealed
by its lens, in favor of letting the wind blow on their faces
as they stare at the open-air view of trees, terrestrial animals,
and the surface of the water available through the open deck windows.
At our captain’s request, many passengers again look down
through the glass bottom of the boat at the rock formation and
jetting spring below. Stopping to float above the Bridal Chamber
spring, the captain tells its legend. The Bridal Chamber is named
after the tale of the ill-fated love affair of Indian Prince Chulcotah
and Winona. She hurled herself into the deepest point of the river
in a moment of agonizing grief over her forbidden love for the
Prince.

It is interesting to note, however, that the
Legend of the Bridal Chamber told today is different from that
quoted in the Silver Springs brochures spanning from the first
half of the twentieth century. 10.
Still a romantic tale of “star-crossed lovers,” earlier
promotion cites the tale of Aunt Silla, “a 110-year-old
negress,” who recalls when her “honey child,”
Bernice Mayo, a poor, yet beautiful maiden, who wasted away after
her wealthy lover’s father refused to let them marry. On
her deathbed, the withering Bernice, asked Aunt Silla to drop
her into the big Boiling Spring (now the Bridal Chamber). Like
Ophelia, Bernice’s frail, porcelain white body gracefully
spiraled downward as the crevice in the riverbed opened welcoming
her. Her lost love, Claire, happened to be rowing by the spring
with his new fiancé (a cousin-bride chosen by his father).
The sparkling light from Bernice’s bracelet, a token of
his love, captured his attention. Knowing it was his old love
reaching upward from the rock, Claire dove downward into the opening
that shut and enclosed him within the riverbed with Bernice for
eternity.

The changing Bridal Chamber legend is yet another example of the
ways in which issues of race, class, and gender are often played
out within Florida’s tourist spaces. Interestingly, the
“negress” tale metamorphoses into an “Indian”
version of Romeo and Juliet as more progressive attitudes toward
African-Americans evolve. Unfortunately, the Aunt Silla caricature,
an example of the age-defying “primitive” seer stereotype
(African-American film director Spike Lee recently coined “the
magical Negro”) is not the only example of racist imagery
in Silver Springs promotion, past and present (see figure 5).
Women and minorities are most often shown in servant roles or
as park attractions. African Americans, for instance, were smiling
servants (glass-bottom boat captains) or minstrel performers.
On Emancipation Day 1949, Silver Springs even opened Paradise
Park, a segregated Silver Springs for “colored people only”
(see figure 6). Seminole Indians were often featured as alligator
wrestlers and colorful, picturesque natives living in the domestic
realm of the Chickee (see figure 7). The tale
of the ill-fated love affair of Chulcotah and Winona still told
today, however, illustrates the continued presence of Native-American
and gender stereotypes at Silver Springs. 11.

Clockwise - Figure 5, Figure 6, Figure 7

Technological
Vision: Science, Power, and the Sublime

Ironically, the exotic characters, danger, and excess illustrated
in the ill-fated love stories so often told by Silver Springs
tour guides starkly contrasts with the controlled experience and
relatively homogeneous riders depicted in the park’s glass-bottom
boat promotion. The promotional rhetoric of Silver Springs and
the glass-bottom boat embody the tension between the total abandon
of sublime experience and the positions of power and containment
that often appear in American conventions of sublime representation.
As travel scholar Chloe Chard contends, “The sublime entails
not only a disruption of the state of immobile contemplations,
but also a re-imposition of that state” (137). The 1930s
promotional brochure exemplifies the magisterial gaze that is
part of the representation of Silver Springs as a sublime landscape.
Signifying the sublime experience as often realized in Romantic
and American Transcendental conventions, a god-like perspective
similar to the elevated viewpoints repeatedly shown in landscape
oil painting is presented to the reader in the opening paragraph
of the 1930s Silver Spring brochure:

Picture if you will a palm-fringed strip beside a lake of sapphire
blue giving rise to a river of sparkling transparency and you
have a birds-eye view of Silver Springs; but the water is blue
only when viewed from a distance, for its crystal depths when
seen from the surface are so clear that every fish and aquatic
plant is an open-sesame.

As Allan Wallach asserts, in the conventions of travel literature
established by James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and Nathaniel
Hawthorne, “The tourist climbs to the top of a mountain,
hill or tower---confronts a panoramic landscape—first overhauled
by feelings of sublimity“ (82). The “birds-eye view
of Silver Springs” presented to the reader provides the
expected panoramic vision so often associated with the sublime
as experienced by tourists. Reminiscent of the Romantic landscape
tradition, the omnipotent view allows the reader “to see”
the spring in its entirety: “Navigable to its very source
and fed by innumerable smaller springs, each a gorgeous beauty
spot in itself, the stream meanders through forest primeval to
join the Oklawaha nine miles away.”

Not only is the reader given a birds-eye view of the formulaically
beautiful “palm-fringed strip” and “sapphire
blue” surface of Silver Springs, but a panoramic view of
the “crystal depths” below the surface is also revealed.
Instead of looking down into the valley atop a mountain-ridge
(like the romantic figures of Durand), Silver Springs’s
visitors experience the sublime through glass-bottom boats that
make visible everything underwater. The tourists stare down from
above, through the glass and “sparkling transparency”
of the water, at the sublime landscape below the subterranean
river’s surface. From the omnipotent perspective of the
tourist, “every fish and aquatic plant is an open-sesame.”
The concluding paragraph even suggests that the mysteries of nature
are revealed in all their beauty at Silver Springs. Nature is
no longer “nature.” Instead it is a theater, a panorama,
an invisible place made visible:

Glass bottom boats ply over Florida’s Subaqueous Fairyland.
The underwater scenery is as gorgeous and varied as terrestrial
plant and animal life is multiple; for here at Silver Springs
Nature has drawn aside the curtain of mystery that shrouds other
waters and revealed the living panorama of a world unknown to
those who have never seen beneath its surface.

Cultural critics Mary Louise Pratt and Allan Wallach have examined
the power and conventional beauty intimated in omniscient views
like the one constructed for modern tourists in the quoted Silver
Springs description. In the groundbreaking text Imperial Eyes:
Travel Writing and Transculturation, Pratt contends that
nineteenth-century travelers often used promontory views with
pictorial conventions to present themselves as a “discoverer”
who has the power/authority to evaluate, if not to possess, a
scene (205). In his 1993 essay, “Making a Picture of the
View from Mount Holyoke,” Wallach uses the term “panoptic
sublime,” to describe issues of power and control he sees
in the Romantic visions of Nature. Wallach argues that the omnipotent
panoramic position of vision seen so often in Romantic and transcendentalist
landscape painting correlates to the surveying control described
by Foucault. In the nineteenth century, only the ruling class
had the time and money to tour because of the expense of transportation
and travel. Wallach writes, for example, “Having reached
the topmost point in an optical hierarchy, the tourist experiences
a sudden access of power, a dizzy sense of having suddenly come
into possession of a terrain stretching as far as the eyes could
see” (83). And in the panorama, the
viewer is shrouded in darkness, invisible, surveying and psychologically
taking possession of all that is laid before him. Like the “open-sesame”
and “living panorama” of Silver Springs, nineteenth-century
panorama paintings, according to Wallach, present the world in
the “form of totality; nothing seems hidden to the spectator,
looking down upon a vast scene from its center, appears to preside
over all visibility” (82). 12.
Using Pratt and Wallach’s thesis, the birds-eye view of
nature written into the 1930s Silver Springs brochure and created
by picture frame glass-bottom boats located at the park, not only
reflects the Romantic aesthetics and values of the old genteel
culture; they offer the tourist the invigorating experience of
possession and power over terrestrial and aquatic Nature.

The supremacy of vision and genteel notions of the sublime and
beautiful expressed within the Silver Springs brochure’s
Romantic rhetoric are also intertwined within the scientific gaze
connoted in the very design and experience of the glass-bottom
boat itself. In many ways the frame and transparent glass of the
boat’s bottom, in which the world below the surface is even
more clearly made visible, functions much like the transparent
lens of a microscope. Like a variety of technologies of observation
that were invented and perfected during the period between the
early Renaissance and the nineteenth century, the microscope made
objects that were invisible visible. These optical technologies
revealed an overwhelming vision of a vast and intricately beautiful
view of the cosmos (both micro and macro). The relationship between
the individual and larger natural systems highly influenced transcendentalists
like Emerson’s concepts of the sublime as revealed by science.
As Wilson contends, “Under the scientific gaze, organisms
become pattern of holistic force, energy, life; an insight into
the relationships between part and whole becomes sublime vision”
(10). Inducing an aspect of the sublime reported by some of its
visitors, the scientific gaze inherent in the glass-bottom boat,
like that of the microscope and telescope, reveals more clearly
the overwhelming depths and biology of the diverse aquatic “universe”
below the Silver River’s surface. The text of the 1930s
brochure, for example, rather flamboyantly boasts that the transparency
at Silver Springs “has drawn aside the curtain of mystery
that shrouds other waters and revealed the living panorama of
a world unknown to those who have never seen beneath its surface.”
Similarly, Emerson once stated when speaking of the night sky,
“One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with
this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual
presence of the sublime” (15).

The vision of the sublime constructed for Silver Springs tourists
by the transparency of the water and the scientific gaze connoted
within the frame of the glass-bottom boat has, in many ways, more
in common with representations of the panoptic sublime as discussed
by Wallach. Unlike the eye level sunsets and upward reaching mountains
created by Romantic painters like Casper Friedrich, the glass-bottom
boat riders are situated high above the vast caverns, jutting
rocks, exotic plants, and abundant fish of the Silver River that
they are watching. Like the amateur naturalist travelers examined
by Pratt, they examine the natural world through the privileged
“lens” of science. Although elements of the sublime
(i.e. anxiety inducing vertigo, disorientation from movement,
and insignificance in relation to the vastness of the depths of
the water) are present, the scientific gaze and the sense of the
picturesque created by the frame of the glass-bottom boat functions
to contain and manage the experience of nature. Like the canvases
of nineteenth-century transcendentalist American landscape oil
paintings or the outer edges optical devices like the Claude Glass,
the “picture window” of the glass-bottom boat functions
to contain and mediate the experience of the vastness of natural
landscapes. As Neumann argues in relation to the optical devices
and park-sanctioned Kodak photo spots made available at the Grand
Canyon by the National Park service, “The general view of
the Grand Canyon is so overpowering that separating a section
of it for a moment and making it a ‘framed picture’
– brings it better within one’s comprehension”
(152).

Cinematic
Vision: Nature and Technology Hollywood Style

As our Silver Springs tour nears completion, our captain slowly
turns the boat around and heads back to the Victorian dock. This
time, however, the boat travels northward, tracing the opposite
side of the bank. During the trip home, the captain boasts about
Silver Springs’ cinematic history. He instructs all passengers
to look at the right bank in order to catch a glimpse of a horseshoe-shaped
“lucky palm” where movie stars such a Frank Sinatra,
Dean Martin, Doris Day, and Don Johnson got their picture taken
while at Silver Springs. The captain reminds everyone not to forget
to get his or her picture taken there before leaving the park.
“Make sure to make a wish,” he adds. The boat momentarily
stops. As the boat hovers, the captain says that he would like
to introduce us to the Silver Springs’ celebrities in permanent
residence. After instructing everyone once again to look down
through the frame of glass embedded in the boat’s hull,
he points to white, fiberglass statues and states that they were
featured players in the television shows I Spy and Sea
Hunt and in several James Bond feature films. As the boat
begins to move again, the captain recommends that everyone take
the Jungle Cruise glass-bottom boat in order to see the set of
Johnnie Weismuller’s television program Tarzan
and the film sets of Marjoire Kinnan Rawlings’s novels TheYearling and Cross Creek.

The moving images created by the frame of the glass-bottom boat
and the passivity of viewers sitting and watching sections of
the world below float past place the natural world within the
culturally sanctioned aesthetics of science, the sublime, and
the picturesque – and is not unlike watching a film. As
Walker Percy asserts, “The very means by which the thing
is presented for consumption, the very techniques by which the
thing is made available, as an item of need-satisfaction, these
very means operate to remove the thing from the sovereignty of
the knower” (62). Jonathan Crary too points out that “technologies
of vision not only suspended the coordinate of a lived time and
space, they equally implicated the spectator in a real and fictional
landscape of successive images effortlessly moving across the
eyes” (158). Anthony D. King also explains, “The window
. . . in modern times functions as a mechanism for consuming the
landscape not only visually (as is the “picture window”)
but also economically and socially” (136).

Conclusion

Influenced by the fact that his Florida essays were part of a
series about the social and economic conditions in the post-Civil
War South commissioned by Scribner’s Monthly, Edward
Smith King writes about a Silver Springs that is a peaceful, harmoniously
beautiful, Edenesque garden. While still maintaining some elements
of the sublime, King frames Silver Springs as picturesque by evoking
the Romantic pastoral conventions like the wandering poet or painter,
the prelapsarian landscape, stylized foliage, and a highly aesthetic
setting sun. He writes:

Yes, what of fiction could exceed in romantic interest the history
of this venerable State? What poet’s imagination, seven
times heated, could paint foliage whose splendors should surpass
that of the virgin forest of the Ocklawaha and Indian rivers?
What “fountain of youth” could be imagined more redolent
of enchantment than the “Silver Spring,” now annually
visited by 50,000 tourists? The subtle moonlight, the perfect
glory of the dying sun as he sinks below a horizon fringed with
fantastic trees, the perfume faintly borne from the orange grove,
the murmurous music of the waves along the inlets, and the mangrove-covered
banks, are beyond words. (145)

Silver Springs as an uniquely American landscape, as a sublime
and picturesque earthly paradise, and the glass-bottom boat as
a privileged way of seeing, all have their roots in European aesthetics
and scientific traditions that attempt to elevate and contain
the natural landscape. By the mid-nineteenth century, Romantic
and American transcendentalist representations of nature as a
sacred space for transcendence and aesthetic pleasure, which contrasts
against the artificial trappings of industrial civilized society,
became an essential part of the visual paradigm of many upper
and middle class Americans. Thus, the quest for and construction
of the sublime, beautiful, and scientific in nature are often
found throughout the history of American environmental tourist
attractions such as Silver Springs and are inseparably intertwined
with American concerns about national identity, culture, and industrialization.
The construction of Silver Springs as a worthwhile tourist destination,
as an edifying, scientific landscape, as picturesque, as sublime
is illustrated in the nineteenth-century travel narratives of
Daniel Brinton, of Constance Fenimore Cooper Woolson, of George
McCall, in the promotional brochures and souvenir books of the
twentieth century, in the narratives performed by glass-bottom
boat captains today, in the essays of Edward Smith King, within
twentieth-century, park-sanctioned promotional materials, and
through the looking glass in the bottom of the boat itself. Even
today, the rhetoric of Silver Springs promoters promises to entertain
glass-bottom boat riders with beauty, motion, and spectacle, but
also offers them a scientific education with a sense of national
pride and cultural progress as well. This rhetoric surrounding
Silver Springs is indicative of the larger role tourism and spectacle
play in how Americans define themselves as individuals and as
a nation.

Notes

1. In Florida, later than many destinations on
the American Grand Tour, tourism as an industry did not really
see its modest beginnings as a significant tourist destination
until the region became a territory of the United States in 1821
and a state in 1845. Florida historian Rembert W. Patrick asserts
that it was during the territorial and early statehood periods
that small numbers of visitors/tourists started to replace the
earlier adventurers and journalists who came to Florida. Patrick
further argues that printed journals such as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
Reminiscences, amongst other publications by lesser-known
visiting authors, “were responsible for an ever-increasing
number of visitors who sought the warmth and sunshine of Florida
before the Civil War” (ix). As early as 1869, according
to Patrick, over 25, 000 travelers were reported to have visited
Florida; less reliable sources boasted even twice that number
(xiii).click here to return to your place
in the article

2. According to both the official Silver Springs website and the
Discover Silver Springs: Souvenir Book available today,
it was Phillip Morrell who first invented that glass-bottom in
the late 1870’s. But it wasn’t until 1890s that the
glass-bottom boat was commercially developed.

5. Most of the culturally “sanctioned”/“certified”
American tourists sights, however, were constructed with little
concern or knowledge of working class or minority tastes and values
until later in the twentieth century. John Kasson, for example,
examines the ways in which the nineteenth-century genteel culture
that dominated early American tourism is eventually subverted
(but never completely) by the more working class aesthetics available
at mass culture entertainment parks like Coney Island and become
even more readily available in the twentieth century. This cultural
shift can also be seen in the snake milking and Alligator wresting
shows that appear in the early 30s when Ross Allen brings his
“Reptile Institute” to Silver Springs.click here
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6. Sears, Nye, Neumann, and Leo Marx all
examine the importance of romanticism, nature, and tourism in
the construction of American national identity.

8. According to Kenneley’s Discover
Silver Springs, the area was designated a Registered National
Landmark in 1925. The U.S. Department of the Interior stated:
“This site possesses exceptional value in illustrating the
natural history of the United States.”click here
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10. “Prince Chulcotah, son of Chief Yemassee,
fell in love with Winona, daughter of Ikehumpkee, and enemy chief.
When Winona’s father learned of her desire to marry the
prince, he declared war on Yemassee’s tribe. Prince Chuloctah
was killed, causing Winona great grief. The story says she lost
her will to live, and on a clear, moonlit night, leapt into the
water and was drowned,” read the contemporary Discover
Silver Springs guidebook (Kenneley 14).click here
to return to your place in the article

11. I have yet to obtain brochures from after
the 1950s; thus, I’m not yet certain when the legend changes
in the official guides books. The first glass-bottom boats were
also named after the park founders. My current research includes
discovering when the boat names changed to those of famous Florida
Indians.

12. In the paintings of Casper Friedrich, for
example, the figures most often are positioned at the horizon
even when standing on mountaintops. In many of the Hudson River
School painting, however, the figures are looking down upon the
sublime landscape spread before them. click here
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Works Cited

Allen, Frederick Lewis. Only Yesterday: An Informal History
of the 1920's. New York: Harper & Row, 1931.